That Summer: A Novel by Jennifer Weiner

Author:Jennifer Weiner [Weiner, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501133541
Google: ah0pEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1501133543
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2021-05-10T23:00:00+00:00

17

Diana

For the weeks and months of that year, through the fall and the winter and into the spring, Michael Carmody courted her, slowly, with great diligence and care. While the weather stayed warm, they did summer-people things. Michael took her to the Wellfleet drive-in, where they sat in the back of his pickup truck and watched a double feature of Back to the Future and Jaws with a giant bucket of popcorn propped between them. They played miniature golf with Michael’s sister, Kate, and her husband, Devin, and spent afternoons visiting antiques markets and art galleries. On the first cool night he made her dinner, linguine with clam sauce, which, he claimed, was the only thing he could cook, and he took her fishing, cheering her on as she reeled in an eighteen-pound bass. In the cottage, he oiled hinges and replaced the showerhead in the bathroom and added a towel bar to the door. In the mornings on her days off, Michael would come over with coffee and scones from the Flying Fish. Together, they’d walk Willa, and Diana would get in the truck with him and help him make his rounds, keeping him company while he patched screen doors or nailed up drooping gutters or changed the chemicals in hot tubs (“can’t tell you how many pairs of underpants I’ve fished out of this one,” he told her, when they’d visited a mansion in Provincetown, high on a hill in the West End).

He invited her to spend Thanksgiving with his family, but Diana wasn’t ready for that yet, so on Thanksgiving Day, he went to his parents’ place in Eastham, and she went home to eat turkey with her mom and dad and sisters in Boston. Then, on Saturday night at the cottage, she and Michael prepared a two-person feast of a turkey breast, stuffing, sweet potatoes, and cranberry sauce made from the berries they’d picked together in the bog.

At Christmastime, she met his father, a larger, gruffer, gray-haired version of Michael, and was formally introduced to his mom the librarian, who was petite and round, with the curly reddish hair Michael had inherited. Mrs. Carmody—“call me Cathy”—cupped Diana’s face in both of her hands and said, “Finally—finally! He brings home a reader! You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting!” before giving Diana a resounding kiss on the cheek and plopping down on the couch, looking smug. “My work here is done,” she announced, and made a pantomime of dusting off her hands, as Kate and Devin gave Diana meaningful smiles, and Michael shoved his hands in his pockets, murmuring, “That’s enough, Ma,” looking endearingly abashed. Diana met Michael’s friends—Victor, who ran a charter fishing company; and Eric, who owned a nursery; and Carolee, who taught at the yoga studio where Diana took her classes. She would have introduced him to Reese and Frankie and Carly and Ryan, her colleagues at the Abbey, except Michael knew them all already.

Some nights at work, toward the end of her shift, Michael would come and sit at the bar, waiting to bring her home.

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